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Snow Day
My brother Eric and I were bored and hot one summer day in Seattle when we were around seven and nine years old. We thought it would be fun have a snowball fight so we started brainstorming how to make snow. We got a bucket and filled it with all of the ice cubes in the upstairs kitchen and downstairs laundry room freezers. We didn’t have an ice shaver, so we brought the bucket outside and started smashing the ice cubes with hammers on the cement patio in the front yard. We tried making snowballs with the finely granulated ice, but it wouldn’t stick together. Realizing we weren’t going to be able to have a snowball fight, we threw the failed “snow” and remaining ice cubes on the front yard lawn to see if it would at least look like winter. We were disappointed that the result simply looked like a bunch of ice cubes thrown on some grass. It struck me that we needed something white and powdery like snow. Eureka – laundry detergent! I ran inside, got a cup of laundry detergent and sprinkled over the lawn to augment the failed snow. It looked very promising but it only covered a patch a couple of feet across. Eric and I went inside and between the two of us dragged the twenty pound box of detergent outside. There was enough “snow” to cover a good ten by twenty foot area of lawn. After five or ten minutes of a “snowball” fight (the detergent didn’t stick together very well) we brushed off the “snow” and went inside. About a half hour later we hear Mom yell from the front yard “PAUL ANDREW REINHOLDTSEN, ERIC GLENN REINHOLDTSEN, COME OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!” Eric and I looked at each other with worry. We knew we had done something wrong because she used our middle names, but we didn’t know what it was. We sheepishly went outside where Mom angrily told us that we had made a huge mess that was going to ruin the lawn. Mom was a passionate gardener – as a kid I thought it odd that other lawns had weeds. She told us we had to clean it up before we did anything else. Of course we complained, said we didn’t know what to do, asked her to help us, said it was unfair to punish us this way – all the usual boy stuff. Still angry, Mom told us she wasn’t going to help, didn’t know how to clean it up, but it better be done by the time she got back from the store buying more laundry detergent! After Mom left, Eric and I dejectedly went to the garage and got a couple of rakes. We tried raking the “snow”, but it just sunk into the grass. After a few minutes wondering what to do, Eric hit on the idea of using the hose to wash it away just like Dad would do with dirt on the driveway. Eric got the hose, adjusted the nozzle and started spraying the “snow” with a jet of water. To our amazement and delight, the snow turned into bubbly foam – lots and lots of bubbly foam. I grabbed the hose from him and started spraying the lawn. I adjusted the nozzle to a wider setting to make even more bubbles and foam. For the next ten minutes Eric and I sprayed the lawn making an ever growing pile of foam that looked much more like snow than our previous efforts. At the end, the ten by twenty patch of grass was covered by a mountain of foam “snow” twice as tall as we were. Before going on I have to point out that our house in North Beach was on a hill with a spectacular view of Puget Sound looking north. Our front lawn was on the downhill side of the house about twenty feet higher than 95th street below. While Eric and I were making our mountain of snow, the air had no discernible breeze. However, a couple of minutes after Eric and I had been playing in our creation, the breeze picked up and lifted our mountain into the air, over the hedge separating the lawn from the bank below. It looked like a giant iceberg floating high over the roadway. We admired it as it slowly descended. Our admiration turned to fear as we saw a car turn from 31st avenue onto 95th street on a collision course with the foam iceberg. Much to our relief, the driver of the car did not seem fazed and simply kept driving with only the roof of the car making contact. The air current of the car broke the iceberg into several smaller bergs, which eventually settled into the neighbor’s side yard across the way. By the time Mom got back from the store, the “snow” across the road had melted or blown away, Eric and I had finished hosing off the remains of the snow, and Mom was in a much better mood – even complimenting us on our excellent clean up job. Eric and I later agreed – that was the best punishment ever!